REVIEW: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie
Best Served Cold took us to the revenge genre, The Heroes took us to war, and now Red Country takes us to the west. Rife with the fantastic character development and intense action that only Joe Abercrombie can deliver, Red Country adds grit, a rescue mission, wide, open terrains, brutal standoffs, prospectors, and the questions & struggles of individualism against the inevitable churning will of civilization. With blood on its knuckles and a keen look in its eyes, Red Country is a dream come true for fans of westerns and grimdarks.
“The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are.”
We start off with Shy South and Lamb, a young woman and her step father, who return to their farm after visiting the town to find it burned to the ground, a friend hung, and Shy’s brother and sister kidnapped. The pair takes off in pursuit, where they come across cheating speculators, roving gangs, and desperate men doing desperate deeds.
The main strength of Red County—as expected in an Abercrombie novel—is the character development. Shy and Lamb are both fascinating characters who have their own buried pasts of violence, but as they race to save the kidnapped children, they have to dig up the tools and come face to face with who they truly are. There’s something so compelling about Abercrombie’s skill of bringing characters to live by showing them struggle to be better while denying what they are. The result of the clashing desires, dialogues, and decisions is a cast of rich, nuanced characters, and Red Country’s biggest success is its cast.
The side characters also burst off the page with nuance and firm humanity. There’s a lot of tropes at play in Red Country between the hard businesswoman, the scheming speculators, the desperate prospectors, the gang members, and so on, but they don’t feel like simple tropes. They fit into a role surely, but not in a way that feels stale.
One last character who deserves a shout out is Temple. Temple is a lawyer for one of the characters making a return to the page in Red Country, and Temple has about as good a time as a lawyer can have in an Abercrombie western fusion. He gets his shit rocked more than once, as well as bullied and underestimated frequently. He persists, growing a backbone as the story goes, and should be a favorite for fans of stories like Senlin Ascends.
From an action perspective, Red Country rivals The Heroes as Abercrombie’s best yet. Instead of the epic battles and widespread death and chaos in the previous novel, Red Country is almost intimate in its proximity to violence. The fights and duels are far more centered on one death at a time, and the result is a bone-crunching, close-up delight.
There’s a duel about halfway through Red Country which is still widely talked about to this day (and for good reason, it’s obscenely hype and one of the most memorable scenes in First Law), but there’s one scene in the first quarter of the book that lives rent free in my mind. Lamb embraces his old ways in a bar fight, and the build up, the dialogue, and the ending is perfection. In the best way, it’s eerily reminiscent in tone, setting, and rising tension of the Hound’s “chicken scene” from Game of Thrones.
“Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.”
This is a western through and through, which means the pacing is slow, the violence can be random and unfair, and everyone is rugged and sweaty. Additionally, Abercrombie has stated that this was a hard novel to write, and you can feel it in instances. There are certain portions where the quality of the novel dips, particularly when Shy and Temple are the main characters on the page. At the end of the day, Red County is a divisive novel. While it’s my personal favorite of the standalones, an objective review would be incomplete without offering fair warning that it’s not for everyone.
For fans of the western genre though, Red Country is a delight. The reunion with some fan-favorites, the action, the dialogue, and the character building is wonderful, and the subversion of expectations of what it means to “ride into the sunset” is something I think about all the time. Red Country is a rugged, but marvelous, work, and I can’t recommend it enough for fans of the western genre.
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